Twitter files for its initial public offering

Twitter Inc. said today it is filing for its initial public offering of stock as it moves to become a publicly traded company.

In an announcement made via a tweet, the microblogging service said only: “We’ve confidentially submitted an S-1 to the SEC for a planned IPO. This Tweet does not constitute an offer of any securities for sale.”

Twitter can file confidentially because of a provision of the Jumpstart Our Business Startups, or Jobs Act, a federal law signed last year by President Obama. Companies with less than $1 billion in annual revenue do not have to disclose revenue and other facts until three weeks before launching their public presentations for potential investors.

A report earlier this year from eMarketer Inc. predicts the microblogging service’s revenue to jump 63.0% to $950.0 million in 2014, and 40.0% to $1.33 billion by 2015.

Twitter's valuation has been estimated at up to $10 billion.

Twitter’s move is hardly surprising. “This is a long-expected move and is likely to be quite well subscribed by investors,” says says Greg Sterling, founder of research and consulting firm Sterling Market Intelligence. “We'll soon find out what Twitter's actual revenue figures are and how they're distributed, i.e., between PC and mobile.”

No further information from Twitter was immediately available.

The announcement comes days after Twitter indicated it would move further into mobile advertising via its purchase of mobile-focused advertising firm MoPub. MoPub’s mobile ad exchange enables advertisers to bid in real time for ad space in mobile apps.

According to Internet Retailer’s 2013 Social Media 300, which ranks retailers by the percentage of traffic to their web sites from social networks, the average web site traffic from Twitter for the Top 50 retailers in that category stands at 0.31%.